Father's Day reveals close ties between the presidents Bush

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (AP)  President Bush has a favorite comeback when people say he is like his father. "I got half my mother in me," he quickly reminds them.

That is not meant as a slight to his mentor and father, whom the younger Bush in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in 2000 called "the most decent man I have ever known." It is more of a reference to his mother's tendency not to mince words, friends say.

Barbara Bush long has been known as a woman who speaks her mind. Bush's dad is regarded as more of a diplomat.

This Father's Day weekend, President Bush is spending lots of time with his diplomatic dad.

They are driving golf balls, trying to outsmart fish and, if history is a guide, taking part in lighthearted ribbing that has been going on for years.

In the summer of 1989, Bush, then the 42-year-old son of a president, dared his father to jump into a small cove off the Atlantic Ocean, which laps against the family's Maine compound at Walker's Point. The elder Bush stripped to his trousers and plunged bare-chested into the chilly water, winning the dare and its $11 payoff.

Bush's four-night stay in Kennebunkport began on his father's 79th birthday. Bush has acknowledged that his father, while still very spry, is getting up in years. Last year, while walking down a dirt path at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush volunteered to a reporter from The Associated Press that he knows every visit with his dad could be the last.

John F. Kennedy was the last president who held office while his father was alive.

"The current president is fiercely protective of his father," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist and longtime Bush watcher at the University of Texas.

Buchanan recalled that it was the younger Bush who took upon himself the unpleasant chore of telling his father's chief of staff, John Sununu, that the first President Bush wanted Sununu to leave. "The blood in this relationship is very thick," Buchanan said.

In many ways, Bush has followed in his father's footsteps. Yale graduates. Military members. Ventures in the oil business. Avid baseball fans. Their paths to the White House, however, were quite different.

The father was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale; the son was a C-average student. The father was a combat pilot in World War II; the son flew jets for the Texas Air National Guard but never saw combat.

The father's resume includes stints as an ambassador, vice president, CIA director and Republican National Committee chairman. Before becoming governor of Texas, the son's career veered off track and he spent his self-described "nomadic years" with a hard-partying crowd.

"This is a guy who has always shown signs of revering his father, but who, as a young man, seemed kind of intimidated by him, or in awe," said Fred Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton University.

"Part of why George W. was such a late starter on the road to maturity was that the male role model in his life was such a superachiever that it was hardly worth trying."

That's history.

"My guess is that the father now defers to the son and is very tactful about what his suggestions are," Greenstein said.

Greenstein suspects historians will discover that the former president has a very important voice in this presidency. For now, though, the two are keeping a curtain down on their relationship.

They speak to each other regularly, but about what is anyone's guess.

"They talk a lot, but nobody knows what they talk about  except probably Barbara Bush and Laura Bush," said Ron Kaufman, political director for the former president. "If anyone tells you that they know what they're talking about they ain't telling you the truth."

Calvin MacKenzie, a government professor at Colby College in Maine, thinks the elder Bush still can offer the president insight into the personalities of world leaders. When Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia complained that Bush seemed too beholden to Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, it was the first President Bush, who is respected in Arab circles, who called the prince to vouch for his son.

"I would be surprised if they had lengthy discussions about the history of Islam," MacKenzie said. More likely, he said, are conversations that start with, "Can you trust Sharon?"

Some suspect the two had a disagreement during the run-up to the war in Iraq. The father assembled an international coalition before committing troops to the Gulf War; the son signaled he could go it alone before bowing to pressure  some from his father's advisers  to first seek U.N. participation.

The first President Bush, ambassador to the United Nations in the Nixon years, is more of a multilateralist than the president, MacKenzie said. "It must have been a little hard for him to stomach the dissing of the United Nations by his son," he said.

Any disagreements aside, Kaufman said their relationship has not changed much since the second Bush was elected.

"The biggest change, I would think, is which motorcade goes first?" he joked.

It was along the motorcade route leading to Walker's Point last week where a resident laid out lawn chairs emblazoned with letters spelling out "Bush 04," offering Bush a reminder of the coming election  and perhaps a lesson his father learned from his defeat in 1992.

It was a weak economy, like the one Bush is trying to prop up today, that kept his father in the ranks of one-term presidents.

Winning re-election next year would be one way for the president to one-up his old man.